This March 28, 2026, millions of pro-democracy “No Kings” marchers should also demand “No Nukes” in the wake of March 28, 1979’s meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.
While a cluster of Democratic governors push restarts of deadly old nuclear power plants like TMI and Michigan’s Palisades, King Donald also wants to restart nuclear weapons testing.
The “No Kings” challenge to Trump’s oligarchic threat to democracy, joined with the “No Nukes” demand for a Solartopian Earth—totally green-powered, no nuclear plants, no atomic weapons—will create an epic moment for the human future.
Trump is the first U.S. president to fire a chairman of the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC was originally entrusted to oversee the 94 U.S. commercial nukes. Now Trump reigns supreme over atomic reactor safety. It’s a terrifying reality.
Meanwhile, his Royal Crime Family has become directly involved financially in the latest “nuclear renaissance,” with merger of the Trump Media & Technology group, in a $6 billion deal, with the California-based fusion energy company TAE Technologies.
Amidst this royal conflict of interest, the Trump White House has issued a stream of executive orders decimating the “regulation” of nuclear power plants, fission and fusion, small and large, present and future.
Along with California’s self-proclaimed “green” Governor Gavin Newsom, Trump is also attacking renewable energy, including solar and wind, batteries and geothermal.
Trump further demands a massive build-up of nuclear weaponry recklessly trashing the fragile global network of agreements meant to shrink our suicidal atomic arsenals.
To better serve his billionaire reactor backers, Trump has unleashed a barrage of “revised” safety regulations that shred already lax health protections. His fiats multiply the “peaceful atoms” pouring into the bodies of downwind neighbors and on-site workers.
Elon Musk’s DOGE has long since purged the NRC’s already thin technical safety staff.
A half-century ago, Dr. John Gofman, first health/safety chief of the original Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor of the NRC, warned that the U.S. reactor fleet (then much smaller than today’s) could every year be fatally irradiating some 32,000 downwind civilians downwind, along with still more on-site staff.
After his involvement in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, Gofman spent the rest of his career warning against the massive health impacts of a technology he helped birth.
Trump’s regal decrees now guarantee a vastly escalated death toll. The DOGE bloodbath leaves the already weak NRC virtually powerless to maintain sound operations at the decrepit U.S. nuclear power plant fleet.
Trump’s firing of an NRC chair and slashing of existing safety standards feed the radioactive cash flow for Trump and his fellow oligarchs. They signal that any NRC employee daring to accurately report on reactor defects and dangers will be ignored and fired.
Even before Trump, the NRC trashed Dr. Michael Peck, its own resident site inspector at the Diablo Canyon double-nuke site in coastal California. During his five-year on-site posting, Dr. Peck warned that Diablo might not survive a seismic shock from one or more of the dozen fault lines surrounding the plant, sending radioactive clouds into downwind Los Angeles and over much of the rest of North America.
Dr. Peck was soon gone. The NRC remains officially unconcerned.
California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom, now selling himself as the anti-Trump, is following Trump’s pro-nuclear lead. In 2018 Newsom (then lieutenant governor) signed a consensus master plan phasing out Diablo for a transition to renewables. The deal was embraced by the utility, the legislature, regulatory agencies, unions, local governments, environmental/consumer groups and more.
Two million solarized rooftops sped the state toward vastly lowered electric rates. Advanced battery storage now guarantees against grid blackouts. For much of most days, the state gets 100% of its electricity from renewables.
But in 2022, Newsom aborted the full transition. His assault on California rooftop solar industry has killed thousands of jobs. He’s moved to let the Diablo’s reactors run at least through 2030.
Like all atomic reactors, they emit massive quantities of heat, greenhouse gasses and deadly radiation. They operate in direct violation of state and federal clean water regulations, none of which Trump or Newsom are likely to enforce.
Diablo’s soaring operating costs, and Newsom’s Trump-like attack on rooftop solar make California’s utility rates the highest in the continental U.S.
Of four big new U.S. reactors been ordered in this century, two in South Carolina died outright, at a sunk cost of $9 billion. Two in Georgia came in seven years late, at $35+ billion, twice their original promised price, producing electricity way more expensive than renewables.
But a pack of Democrats still join Trump to push so-called Small Modular Reactors, their only operating model is in China. Specialized SMR fuel right now comes only from Russia. The first U.S. SMR order has died. Projected SMR costs are now 3 times over proven wind, solar, geothermal and battery storage, none of which create radioactive emissions or waste.
A definitive study from the free market CATO Institute predicts that SMRs—indeed the entire latest “nuclear renaissance”—will be buried (again) by far cheaper, cleaner, faster-to-build Solartopian technologies.
Trump royally claims that ultra-hyped data and AI centers will provide their own power. But Democratic Governors Newsom, Hochul (N.Y.), Pritzker (IL), Shapiro (PA), Whitmer (MI) all falsely claim public-funded nukes to run them will be “emission-free” and somehow safe, despite Trump’s self-dealing regulatory exemption and the lack of meaningful insurance.
Whitmer and Shapiro want to restart dead reactors at TMI and Palisades despite terrifying technical pitfalls and projected costs and delivery times very far beyond renewables. Hochul has just arranged for four aged nuclear power plants in New York—including the oldest in the nation, Nine Mile Point l—to continue to run through a subsidy of $33.3 billion paid for over 20 years by all the state’s electric ratepayers on their electric bills.
Too many regular Democrats still falsely claim that nukes are safe and carbon/emission free, as if TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima never happened. They won’t face that renewables are exponentially cheaper, faster to build, more reliable and produce more jobs.
Meanwhile Trump’s parallel push for new atomic and hydrogen bombs, with a return to testing of nuclear weapons, stands to trigger a renewed global nuclear arms race and the spectre of not only an end to democracy but to our species’ survival on this planet.
On March 28, 1979, unmeasured radiation spewed into the Pennsylvania countryside, killing untold American citizens.
On March 28, 2026, let’s join forces to protect our shredded democracy in the face of a deranged psychopath who would rule as a king alongside his billionaire oligarchs.
Let’s also march to abolish the atomic reactors and their sibling weapons that threaten our ecological and biological existence.
And let’s win a Solartopian economy—rooted in solar photovoltaics, wind, geothermal, batteries, efficiency, conservation and the other nature-based technologies we need to survive and thrive on this planet.
On March 28, let’s all be out there…everywhere….smiling, dancing, marching, laughing, WINNING!!…for NO KINGS & NO NUKES!!
Harvey Wasserman wrote the books Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and The Peoples Spiral of US History. He helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.” He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition at www.electionprotection2024.org Karl Grossman is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He the host of the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman (www.envirovideo.com)
